About oakville.ca

We’ve redesigned oakville.ca to offer the best user experience we can. Our goal is to use simple language and page design to communicate the services that the Town of Oakville provides. 

There have been many changes, all with the goal of making our website easier to use and understand. Many parts of oakville.ca have been rewritten, rebuilt, or moved within the site. These changes will be an adjustment for all of us, but the result will be a great improvement for our visitors.

If you have any suggestions for us, we'd love to hear them! Please send them to us using the Customer Service Feedback form. 

Accessibility

Accessibility is very important to us and we are committed to removing barriers that limit access to our website. Our goal is to:

• meet or exceed Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA) guidelines for website accessibility
• explain our services in simple, inclusive terms

If you have an accessibility question about the website, please send it to us using the Customer Service Feedback form and we will work to resolve it.

To learn more about our corporation's accessibility policies and procedures, visit the Accessibility and Inclusion page.

Design decisions

Between 2019 and 2023 we completed a website redesign project to enhance the user experience of oakville.ca.

With the help of our vendors, we completed plans, audits, analysis and public engagement exercises to collect feedback about our website needs. This resulted in the design you see on our website today. 

The new website offers improved:

• Access to online services
• Accessibility
• Compatibility with your devices
• Content
• Design
• Functionality
• Navigation
• Search results
• Privacy and security
• User experience

Language and content

We want to write using language that is:

• accessible
• simple
• confident
• helpful

Some of our departments do complicated work. Our goal is to explain complex ideas in simple terms so that everyone can understand. To do that, we will avoid quoting legal and technical documents and will offer simple and clear explanations instead. For those interested in the complicated details, we will also offer hyperlinks to specific by-laws, legislation and reports etc.

We do not present information using FAQ format. We believe that this is not a best practice for web content and that it can lead to duplicated information.

We want our website to have a conversational tone, so we use an active voice instead of a passive voice. We are speaking directly to you!

In our website you can expect to find our content delivered in a number of ways, including:

• Short sentences that use simple language
• Short paragraphs with no more than five sentences
• Bulleted and numbered lists
• Buttons to link to other pages, websites or PDF files
• Cards that contain information, links and PDF files
• Accordion containers to hide or display content, depending on user interaction
• Tabs that can hide or display content, depending on user interaction
• Calendars
• Images and image galleries
• Maps 
• Videos

Ownership

This site is owned and maintained by the Strategy, Policy and Communications team, part of the CAO's Office.